Franz Kafka and Don Quixote would feel right at home watching Ground Floor (Földszint), the new film from Hungarian auteur Gábor Reisz. But former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would very likely not be amused.
Back in 2023, Reisz’s Explanation for Everything, a dramatic look at the culture wars, won the best film award in Venice’s Horizons (Orizzonti) program. Now, he is back at the Venice Film Festival, this time in the Venice Spotlight section, with a sharp social and political satire. Ground Floor is a deep dive into a quixotic journey into an existential crisis that is full of absurdity, dark humor, political metaphors and mold – yes, mold!
The film, world-premiering at Venice on Thursday, Sept. 10, stars Ádám Tompa (Blue Heron) as Kristóf, a failed artist who, on a single day on which he and his wife want to go on a lake holiday, learns that he will become a father and discovers strange black mold in their apartment. To the exasperation of his wife, the usually apathetic man is spurred into rare action to solve the mold issue. He doesn’t even really know the people in the building. Can he fix the mold emergency and change things for the better?
Or, as a logline for Ground Floor puts it: “Which will break down faster – the building where Kristóf lives, or the apathy from which he awakens to find himself at the forefront of a tragicomic domestic revolution?”Rodrigo Crespo, Bettina Józsa, Tünde Bacskó, György Gazsó, Juli Kindl, Éva Tímár and Marcello Fonte also star in Ground Floor, which Reisz co-wrote with Éva Schulze (Explanation for Everything) and Zsófi Reisz-Varga. Kristóf Becsey handled the cinematography, while Reisz and Schulze edited the film with Dávid Jancsó and Ilka Janka Nagy. Films Boutique is handling sales.
